ENTANGLEMENT is the name of an experimental digital tape album that I self-published via coolmixtapes.com on February 16th, 2021, during the second year of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It is very much an expression of the period and the social ideas that gained berth during lockdown. The album is only available digitally, while physical assets for a limited self-production lay in my personal storage. The years prior and following the release were rife with personal tumult and conflict that both shaped the recordings and simultaneously rotted my mental health. The length of the album is intended for recording to magnetic tape cassette and, at the time, this humorous idea I had that an album long enough to listen through during a smoke break would be ideal in a time of compulsive workforce labour and social isolation. It is also only available in the maximum resolution of 24 kbps MP3 encoding. The extremely low file size was inspired by an idea of making an album that can be downloaded on virtually any speed Internet from anywhere in the world with little impact to any limitations. The sonic characteristics of the low resolution were also chosen for its ability to communicate the minimum to make the music intelligible. It especially meant that higher frequency characteristics of any sound wouldn't be masked by the train or loud machinery in the city. The impetus for the lossy qualities as a whole was to express a society growing with detritus from neglected infrastructure and interpersonal discard.
The world of ENTANGLEMENT was frequently imagined, iterated, reimagined, and contemplated as curiosity lead to results which lead to reflection and again fed further curiosity. Social interaction had been practically restricted to the world wide web and thus was subject to the limits of Internet provision. Interacting in physical space isn't distorted by buffering, digital resolution, and packet timing, while now it distorted every interaction. The number of people familiar with the packet stutter or reduced bit rate crushing their loved ones' voices grew magnitudes larger and the audience of Internet users older in age increased all at once by necessity. Some memories of the people I cherish are stuck in low resolution forever, leaving an impression of the time period which is otherwise occasionally difficult to place in chronological time.
The album is intentionally characterised by packet loss, an effect left entirely to chance. Re-recording the songs would thus change the "natural" characteristics of the packet loss effects which does mean that the record can never be precisely reproduced. Like a record player needle slowly erodes the memory encoded in a vinyl record's topology, or like the record & playback heads of tape players introducing noise to magnetic tape, there exists the idea that memories are constantly erased and recorded anew when recalled, each time subtly altered, and thus never the same. The digital equivalence exists in fragmentation, a slow re-allocation of packets that occurs mostly as the duration between recalling files increases. This packet loss is meant to represent the challenge of memory.
The primary influences on my music taste at the time were that of my friends in online spaces like Friend Land, SoundCloud and bass-oriented music at large, and metal music. I was focused on making a collection of songs that feel heavy in a way that represents the current era. What makes for a "heavy" sound at first feels simple, practically obligatory: not just loud, but low in frequency. When examined further, there is much more to discover. Interval, the harmonic relationship between notes, and timing, the temporal relationship between notes, both can be exercised to emphasise heaviness. The lowest bass note you can imagine most certainly can feel heavy -- but imagine it now with modulations in its amplitude. That low note that can shake you with its fundamental frequency alone could shake you in time with its modulation, without imparting a different tone like a chord. If a 20 Hz sine wave, the lowest "audible" frequency in the sound spectrum, has a 1 Hz amplitude modulation, now this gargantuan frequency swells and subsides like the breath of a colossus. Heaviness in the interval is expressed throughout the album using the RingMod effect on the master. Such a technique is frequently decried when focusing on audio quality because RingMod applies the same amplitude modulation to everything. This quality is frequently executed by SoundCloud rappers and their producers, especially those influenced by Drain Gang and RVIDXR KLVN, who use Fruity Loops. Smashing everything into a compressor on the master, like OTT, achieves the same effect while remaining dynamically harmonic. The amplitude modulation of a compressor is related directly to a sound's frequency and amplitude, while a RingMod effect allows control over the exact rate of amplitude modulation. This means, with simple precision, a RingMod can be used to emphasise the root notes of a bassline while adjusting the harmonic content of other notes based on the interval between it and the RingMod effect. Within Renoise, my digital audio workstation of preference, this RingMod rate can even be connected directly to an instrument's notes, allowing for the same dynamic harmonisation but for a single note. The entire song can rumble with the fuzz of the bass notes alone, invoking the suggestion that every instrument gives way to the weight of the bass without being trampled by an overwhelming difference in amplitude.
I occasionally stretched the heaviness that can result from timing to a point of dizzying pseudo-effectiveness. On many of the tracks, I've spaced the kick drums so as to feel totally out of time, missing the downbeat of each bar intentionally, and yet each song sways and breaths with a life of its own like a pinwheel spinning in sympathy with vacillating breeze or the pulse and breath of the uninterruptible industry machine. The principle example for this is immediate and innocuous in rap music: the imitable and nearly revered Plugg 808. You've heard it an incalculable number of times -- the bass kick sounds with the kick drum delayed slightly after the sub bass. There is a physiological psychoacoustic limit to what kind of delay sounds like the instrument is one, like the example Plugg 808, versus clearly seperate. Within this obvious separation, I believe it stands to reason that a "harmonic" of this time which collapses two sounds into oneness is possible. It is not heavy in the same way that a piston strikes a surface and immediately rebounds, but more like the weight of an object stretching a hammock with an elongated time to its peak displacement and slower return to equilibrium. Or something like the weight of the planets and the expression of its gravity on space. Track 1, jupiter was a proof in concept of that very notion that something in the macrocosmos reflects in the subtleties of the human sensorium.
Some of this emphasis on timing was derived from the influence of Devin Townsend's production for Strapping Young Lad and during his Devin Townsend Project. You can hear his talk on Heavy Sounds on YouTube. He expresses the sludgy heaviness that can result from timing very literally in a way that especially makes sense for metal. He demonstrates the importance of attack in an instrument sound, which I'll describe more later with my approach to physical modeling synthesis, and the heaviness that can come from drums, bass, and guitar playing just slightly out of time with each other to create this sense of an elongated "one."
While some synth samples were taken from packs, like jupiter, a song built entirely from a Taylor Morgan pack, the remainder of the synth sounds on every track were built to imitate physical instruments like thumb pianos, guitar and violin, vibraphones, Rhodes keys and rotary speakers, and vocal choirs -- sounds that I intended to invoke these feelings of humanity that were then filtered through the digital distortions of a decaying technological world. For much of the sounds I spent a significant amount of time focusing on the attack of the sound and the way my personal manipulation the inputs of an instrument alters the sense of attack. I gave portamento to idiophones, added short noise envelopes for frequency modulation, dropped the octave of small instruments like flutes into the range of subcontrabass instruments. I focused on the actions of sounds, the nature of wind like that which makes our own voice, the scraping of strings in guitar and violin like magnetic tape passing by tape heads, and the striking of bells and bars like the steady march of industry, all to emphasise humanity and machine coalescing ever rapidly towards a singularity. All these principles, of heavy sounds, of manipulation in time and interval, of thinking creatively when breaking preconceived standards, and of humanity combine to create the foundation for ENTANGLEMENT. From there, each track began as concepts of individual exercises to learn and improve my abilities and connect with music in a way that sparked my curiosity instead of lending itself to the mechanical and formulaic production line: why do we do things, how do we do it, and are we really thinking in detail about our preferences?
Track 1, jupiter, started everything around the Spring/Summer of 2020. I listen to so much grime and drill had fully mutated at the time through the filter of UK music and my connection to the culture is totally remote by consequence of living in a totally different country. I started to deconstruct those sounds and work them into my own structures out of curiosity for what is possible -- what sort of stuff are people making that we never hear? Where are the white labcoat scientists developing grime 3? To me, it made perfect sense to make what I wanted to hear even if it would stay a purely experimental exercise and not someting shared. I was very enthusiastic with the quick results of the first track and received some enthusiasm from friends which made it all the more exciting to share. I felt I had a concept developing wihch drove me to explore and share.
Track 2, exits, was my first foray into full composition, sound design, and synthesis for this new format I was imagining. It was especially inspired by Veil of Maya, Entry Level Exit Wounds. In addition to the princples that made the foundation for the concept, I wanted to build certain instruments with timbres that changed dynamically across octaves. The result to me feels something cosmic, otherworldly, and hallucinogenic while maintaining the physicality of dub mixing mechanics, like a meteor shower in a lunar eclipse's path of totality during an aurora.
Track 3, nightmare, especially resulted from wanting to hear someone rap over these concept instrumentals. Zombae is one of the only rappers that ever inspired me to collaborate, who also delivered hand-over-fist fo the lyrical performance. I even remixed the vocals and mixed the tune with a previous track titled obstruction for an audio-visual celebration by Friend Land where you can watch Star Fox obliterate Andross during the song. At that link, you can also hear a limited number of the songs from this tape in higher quality, all synchronised to select video. The result is occasionally quite strange and unreminiscent of the concepts from the album, but I assure you the songs are largely unedited aside from removing the lossy mastering effects.
Track 4, tortuous, grew particularly from the suffocating miasma of social isolation as an essential worker. Days blended into the next, fear wafted through the air from the looming threat of an invisible and fatal adversary. Downtown Chicago was ghostly in population and, at times, by weather. Rain, fog, even sunshine all feels disturbingly different in a majour metropolis completely devoice of people where you are still expected to work. The train car felt private and personal despite its unfaltering timeliness and unsettling vacancy. Every day felt the same while social interactions online grew more paranoid, callous, and violent. The whole song is centered around the manipulation in performance and timing of a single chord across two dull idiophones. The two compositions dance around each other, at times playing a note while the other rests, and are slightly out of time with each other, giving a unique characteristic to their unison that is not present in either instrument individually. The drums, of course, lag behind the gnarled bass and leads, emphasising the sedative and hypnotic nature of this strange moment in history.
Track 5, fissure, was inspired by the heartbreak of having no connection to a long distance lover other than virtual. I could hardly see my local friends in person and the person I wanted to see most was completely out of reach, locked behind travel bans. It was a bitter feeling not just for the frustration made by the involuntary separation, but because my relationship was breaking apart while I wanted to cling to it so desperately in an uncertain time. I wanted to experiment more with these idiophones as leads and what could result from manipulating the attack of the sound difficult to recognise as the guitar that it is. Additionally, I used a shrill vocal sound to help fill the space with a sort of tense choir. A contemplation of the feeling from a voice I missed so dearly lashing out at me only when the air around me wasn't still with a vast nothingness.
Track 6, quasi-phasic layer, was a direct study of another person's songwriting. I had been listening to Bladee and Yung Lean since my friends around me were inspired by them to make music. I was listening more for the beats than the bars. I fault my own skills mostly because anything I know is self-taught or driven purely by curiosity. I mimicked the composition of a Bladee song (which I will edit in when I remember it) and used my own instrumentation and style to make something that I liked. This track was a momentary milestone that culminated from a feeling of more confidence in my concepts and sound design while accepting I had much to learn as it came to composition. Maybe I know more than I really allow myself to say. I've always considered myself technical and not an instrumentalist or musician.
Track 7, pearls, came after this milestone in confidence as a more developed and raw expression of these dizzying feelings of sleeplessness and untethered dissociation within a heavy material reality. My fatigue and isolation started to make the days feel simultaneously shorter and longer, like I was falling asleep at the same time I was awaking from slumber, a sort of somnic mesh finger trap.
Track 8, cathode rain tube, was another expression of this confidence in my concept and skills. I focused these principles I developed into a format more plainly reminiscent of dubstep, where I think similar concepts of heaviness and experimentation have yet to be truly explored. This song came together very quickly as a result of all the practice I'd done developing my techniques and tools. This song and the final song are the true proof of concept for the ideas in my focus.
Track 9, rapid mass transit, is an application of these tools and techniques to the drill sound. The name itself is a play on "mass rapid transit", meant to change the focus from the volume of rapid transit to the speed of transporting a mass. In this case, a bullet from a gun. While drill isn't monolithic, I quickly grew tired of all the braggadocious confessions of murder, whether it's just for show. While the notorious Gun Lean is a reference to the body language of firing really powerful guns (or having weak arms), it lends itself to dance. Drill is, to me, synonymous to me with dance and the club from its very foundation like a lot of rap music. Even the grittier, darker sound that became memphis rap originated from the club. DJ Spanish Fly says he was enjoying gangster movies at the time and wanted to tell those stories in his lyrics. It's still possible that drillers are doing the same, scripting a character they perform, but it is impossible to deny that this is not always communicated to listeners. Some listeners are unfortunately embedded in a culture that convinces them to kill, that they have to be "bad" to make it in this world. One of my family overseas died to knife violence exactly from a culture such as this which does not discuss the staged aspects of these performances, that killing is not something which strengthens someone's mettle, or that such acts should simply not be imitated and are not points of pride. Perhaps even the drillers confess such things creatively in an attempt to excise the depth of guilt they feel from such marks on their souls. Regardless, my cousin is no longer living because he stood against such a culture. He was killed in the parking lot of a venue where people were commemorating one of his friends who was killed by knife violence.
There is one final component of the tape. The digital delivery of the tape, while currently available via coolmixtapes, was intended to be embedded in an image of the album art. UNIX can combine two file types such that renaming the file changes how the file is expressed. Below I will link the album art which can be viewed, saved anywhere on your computer, and renamed from a .png to a .zip to reveal a compressed folder containing the album. The file can be renamed .png again to be stored as an image either for secret transmission or simply a creative and somewhat more engaging way to download music. It's something I used to do on imageboards in the 00s so we could share music without mods banning us for sharing copyrighted files.
Thank you for reading!
If you have trouble, right-click me for the compressed folder without the album art.